Elizabeth Honey

My latest book is the fourth in the Stella Street series. It follows The Ballad of Cauldron Bay but is quite different. I am writing it with a German woman, Heike Brandt. Heike has translated my books into German and I met her in Berlin in 2002. She’s lively and opinionated, with a sharp multi-lingual sense of humor. When she agreed to the suggestion that we write a book together I knew we were in for an interesting time! Leo, (Heike) is a thirteen-year old boy in Berlin who gets in touch with Henni (me). The plot evolves through their emails. The friendship grows and when things turn ugly they confide in each other. It will be published next year.
 
The best thing about being a writer is working with great people like Heike, and the team at my publishers, Allen and Unwin, and the places writing takes me, and the people I meet. Another best thing is when someone shyly tells me they really liked one of my books. 
 
If I wasn’t a writer I’d be a kindergarten teacher or a movie director. Working on a picture book you are a director-on-paper. You control the story, characters, setting, costumes and the visuals, but you don’t have movement or sound and it doesn’t cost six million dollars.
 
My first published work was a little story in Puffinalia, the magazine of the Australian Puffin Club, 1981, edited at the time by Michael Dugan. My story was called Notes on Being Invisible.
 
Morning person or night owl? Night owl turned morning person by children. Which is okay. I sometimes have good ideas when I go for a walk first thing. 
 
My first job, first real job was as a Gramophone Operator or ‘grams op’ at Channel 2, Melbourne. It looked cool, sitting in front of several turntables and a tape deck wearing earphones or ‘cans’ but involved playing music while the clock on the screen ticked up to the hour, when my music was supposed to end with a musical sting a second before I hit the button for the news theme right on seven o’clock. Moments of panic, but it was a good job for learning how a TV station worked. 
 
On a quiz show, my special subject would be my opinion on the state government pinching public parkland.
 
My last holiday was to Perth to visit our son, Gig, who’s studying acting at WAAPA. He’s the one who illustrated my book Don’t Pat the Wombat! when he was in Grade 5. That’s the only book I didn’t illustrate. 
 
My perfect Saturday is unplanned, but would include shopping at Gleadel Street market, then a lovely lazy lunch with all the family.
 
The last CD I bought was Miriam Makeba. Boy, now there’s a great grandmother! We saw her at one of those free concerts during the Commonwealth Games. She is impressive: her voice rich and powerful, and she moves like no great grandmother I know, she’s stylish, she was wearing a dramatic outfit with a high sculpted collar, but what really gets you, throughout her long career she’s fought for equal rights and was exiled from her home, South Africa, for 31 years.  
 
My absolute all time favourite CDs are Paul Simon’s Gracelands, and Rhythm of the Saints and The Capeman and Emmylou Harris’s Wrecking Ball and Undercurrent by Jim Hall and Gil Evans, Porgy & Bess by Miles Davis and Gil Evans and good old Pet Sounds by the Beach Boys and Dylan’s Highway 61 Revisited and the Beatles’ The White Album.
 
I’m currently reading The Shifting Point by Peter Brook, his thoughts on directing theatre, film and opera. He says: ‘When I begin to work on a play, I start with a deep, formless hunch, which is like a smell, a colour, a shadow.’ 
That’s how I feel starting a book—‘a deep formless hunch.’
 
Big Brother or Australian Idol? Nope. Give me Enough Rope, The Insiders, 4 Corners (How was the Forkers on the book 1421! Now that’s opportunistic avaricious publishing!) Docos on SBS like the one recently on the making ofTen Canoes, and an English drama series like Bleak House with all those eccentric English actors playing all those eccentric English characters, that’s pretty nice.
 
Favourite films My Life as a Dog, Stand By Me, Blade Runner, The Matrix, the first Star Wars filmed, also the first Alien (which has the best opening sequence ever) and Strictly Ballroom and Mad Max 2. These have all stood my test of time.
 
My favourite books—The Ballad of the Sad Café, you can really hear the voices in Carson McCullers’ stories, Pippi Longstocking, and My Antonia by Willa Cathar, Alasdair McCloud’s No Great Mischief, the powerful short story Singing my Sister Down from the book Black Juice by Margo Lanagan, Tuck Everlasting by Natalie Babbett. Russell Hoban’s stories. Poetry by William Hart Smith. 
 
The book character I would most like to meet is Pippi Longstocking, 
 
The book character I would least like to meet is…I don’t want to say his name.
 
The worst thing I’ve ever written is hopefully not too bad. Rosalind Price, my publisher at Allen and Unwin is a good safety net. She wouldn’t publish anything that was awful. 
 
When I was growing up I wanted to be an artist of some sort. I loved drawing and knew I was a good drawer because when I drew something other kids would say ‘Gee, that’s a good drawing!’
I think, deep down inside I thought I could write, but that came about much much later when I’d done a bit of living and had something to write about. I still feel a little surprised to hear myself described as an author. 
 
My heroes are Astrid Lindgren who understood kids so well, David Suzuki who has hung on through the years telling us what we’re doing to the environment and not giving up in disgust. He told us all this was going to happen. Gilbert Tippett, my 94 year-old uncle, an inventor who definitely thinks we should take the nuclear route, (we wrote Energy Forever together in 1984), Christobel Mattingley who gets her teeth into a difficult subject and sticks with it until she’s written something that makes it understandable for children, and Bob Brown for having the audacity to think that everyone in the world should have one vote. 
 
If I was a car I’d be a bike.